Project 31-A

This last week I attended “Information Making Sense of the Deluge” hosted by The Economist (on my own dime and time). http://ideas.economist.com/event/information Available on line at http://fora.tv/conference/ideas_economy_information   First , this was the best conference that I have attended in at least 20 years… They had a strict “No Death by PowerPoint” policy. Less than 300 participants and 60 speakers. Talks and panel discussions were typically just 10 – 20 minutes each. A massive number of awesome speakers. Since we often present data, I should point folks to the works of Edward Tufte a Yale Emeritus Professor who is renowned for his data visualization and information design (see http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ -- he is giving one-day courses in Seattle on the 20 th and 21 st of June). He has written publications on some of the problems with PowerPoints. These URLs will show some of his data visualizations: Bing Images Goog...

Last Friday I had a long discussion on different type of developers and their relevant value for an ongoing company. I am not talking about a startup-pancake (typically venture capital based whose model is to sell or flip into an IPO – then walking away with the money).   Support/Maintenance Developer This is a developer that is completely happy doing high quality fixes, dotting I’s and crossing T’s. It is typically a destination career – one that is grossly underpaid for their value.  In terms of construction industry, he is someone that comes in an fixes leaky roofs and windows, change furnace filters and all of the way up to doing minor additions. If you are familiar with Holmes on Homes , we talking of Mikes, and not the type that he ends up undoing and redoing.  A good one will often spend their entire career at one company, well appreciated (but likely underpaid!).   Release Developer This is where most developers ends at being.  Typically the...

Actually for many managers today, read it for the first time. (It’s on line here )   “It's an absurdity. An Alpha-decanted, Alpha-conditioned man would go mad if he had to do Epsilon Semi-Moron work–go mad, or start smashing things up. Alphas can be completely socialized–but only on condition that you make them do Alpha work. Only an Epsilon can be expected to make Epsilon sacrifices, for the good reason that for him they aren't sacrifices; they're the line of least resistance. His conditioning has laid down rails along which he's got to run. He can't help himself; he's foredoomed.” For the illiterate, Alpha’s are the  smartest ones. The Harvard Business Review just made a video available called “ Hiring: Finding People Who Fit ” which echo similar thoughts.   Recently I have been mentoring several younger folks, and for some, I see the definite attitude that “ All people should be made in my image ”. No ability (or even consideration) of walking i...

Yesterday I spent a hour and a half with a local developer who develops websites for local firms. He called because of my earlier posts on copyright issues. After getting a night to sleep on it, I suddenly said “dung, it’s a legal mine field today”. I will scenario two cases: A site using some form of open license software (i.e. JQUERY etc) A site using some 3rd party component that the developer is licensed for (for example, FLASH, TELERIK etc) “Our contract says that the customer owns the code” Without a lot of clean legal qualification of what the exactly means – you are in breach of contract with both of the above scenarios! The customer would need to sign the dozen of pages of legalesse required to qualify this. Why???? If you are giving them ownership of the code and using JQUERY, then you are saying that they own JQUERY and can legally sue anyone else that uses the JQUERY. If you exclude 3rd party components but supply code that sets or alter properties ...

Lately I have been attempting to assist two former business partners in resolving a dispute. The problem arose because one of them resigned in writing from a LLC leaving the LLC completely in the hands of the other. There can be many reasons for someone doing so: The LLC is getting into murky legal waters and the person wishes to wash their hands of it to avoid being tainted with potential future problems; The LLC is financially underwater (which I believe is correct in this case) and the person decides that future efforts of getting it viable is not worthwhile the effort Typically, the person bailing out will form a new LLC and may pursue a similar business model. The dispute is an interesting one because it is akin to an employee quitting a company and then turning around and demanding severance, their chair, their PC and all of the software on it that was purchased by the corporation. It appears to be a combination of a sense of over-entitlement and not under...

I attended Entrepreneurs Coffee this morning, see a lot of familiar faces and a few new ones. The speaker was Jim Benson, the author of the newly released book " Personal Kanban " as one of the founders of the Seattle's Lean Coffee. A few interesting notes that I took are: Jim and his partner(in DC) or clients will by on Skype 100% of the working day, not having a conversation – rather just hearing each other clicking away. When an issue arose, there is no need to make a telephone call or start a Skype conversation… he just speaks up !  Elegant approach. Sharing a virtual skype cubicle. Economy of scale does not work for Knowledge Workers – the more of them that you get involved, the lower the return per employee. I have seen this often and have been known to say “Don’t give me two developers to help me meet the deadline unless you really want to miss the deadline!”. Solo-coding (for me) often results in the highest output. Passing information and making sur...

This is a continuation of my startup series consisting of the prior posts of: Startups and Sql Server Databases Who should be in a startup team? So you want to do a startup – the “F” projects So you want to do a Startup – the “E” projects Startups: The napkin business plan Startup: Garage or Angel Funded or Solo So you want to do a Startup – the “A” projects So you want to do a Startup – the “D” Projects So you want to do a startup – the “C” projects So you want to do a startup–the “B” projects So you’re a developer and want to do a start-up … Some observations on Startups / Angels Funded Comp... If you want to do a startup there are three things to consider for Intellectual Property: Patents Trademarks Servicemarks NOTE THE FOLLOWING IS NOT LEGAL ADVISE – ALWAYS CONSULT AN ATTORNEY Patent means that some is new (novel) in how you are doing things. This may be something that seems minor like “One-Click” (Amazon). You can apply for patent on almost anything, and the track record for th...

Often a startup tosses out a database to get a web site up or product out of the door. This is reasonable when there is neither the time(-to-market) nor the money (for SQL Data Modelers and developers).   For a web site there is usually one of two patterns of evolution: Use the production database for development. There’s no problem of matching database to next generation code base. Side-effects can be horrible from miscoding or security breaches. Use a clone of the production database and then evolve it with the next generation code. For a product database, 2. above is the typical option. We will consider this type of option alone in this post. The second pattern we need to look at is a non-issue for a one-man development shop, but arises with there are multiple developers: A single shared development database Any problems impacts the entire development team Each developer has their own development database Each devel...

Last night I attended the local Linux Group meeting with a presentation on  a MS Access/OO.Base to Drupal presentation described as:   “Most people think of drupal as a website framework system. However, it can also serve effectively as a replacement to the forms/reports/tables system utilized by access and base. (as well as many other things, but we won't discuss that formally tonight) No prior knowledge of Drupal is required, and for those who do understand drupal, we will go through using cck and views, as well as a few other modules to develop a replacement for a small access database.” Since this is a Windows Blog, it appears to be off target – however since it’s a emotionally-detached example to illustrate what is also seen with Windows stuff. As a FYI, I grew up on CP/M and ran Mark Williams Unix ( Coherent ) in the mid 1980’s, we have three Linux boxes in the house.   The first  thing that I struck me during the talk was that the speaker was l...

Often people approach a startup with a naive attitude that they can succeed by just doing what they want to do. The reality is that there are many roles that need to occur to have a reasonable chance for success. In this post, I will summarize a lean team and the roles that they may need to implement. Idea person – who should function as Domain Expert Tester – does the product match their vision? Handling Sales Calls  (because they speak the client language – hopefully) Product Manager – the decision maker for the development team Researcher Business case writer Specification writer Project planner Documentation writer Tester Code reviewer Liaison Handling Sales calls Developer Team A pair of developers Team Programming' Redundancy if one leaves ----------------------------------...

“F” is for friendly. This type of startup addresses the frequent problem of insufficient domain knowledge (outside of coding and possible “day job”). “Day Job” domain knowledge often run risks of conflict of interest, or if your employment contract is hard-nose, the startup could become claimed (with no remuneration) by your day job employer.   The basis of the “F” project is to be friendly to the local business community. Via local business groups (for example TAG in Whatcom county), you indicate you (or you as a part of a group) are willing to do pro-bono work for smaller business in the area. This is a fine line, the work should not be doing for free what they would likely pay someone to do (like create a web site) – that is bad karma. What you want to do is something that fills a gap.   I will give an example from my experience, when I meet my wife she was production manager for a firm that reproduce by hand figurines, C.Alan Johnson .  There was a dozen empl...

“E” stands for educational. The main purpose is to improve your education or knowledge, making money or moving up to a better job is a possible side-effect.   The keys for an “E” project is Early Adapter of a version 1.0 language, product etc. Ideally within 6 months of release “Academic Research Languages” and “Niche Languages” are an exception. Be prepare for 6 “wasted time” for every success Actually, the time is not wasted – you have increased your width of knowledge and patterns . Be product/offering directed. A few examples from my own past. APL/360 (in 1968) – main benefit was seeing what was seeing what was possible beyond currently available languages like Assembly, Fortran, COBOL, EasyCoder. C did not come into existance until 1973 B (that which C was based on) did not come into existence until 1970 Most developers have zero experience with this, which is still a much higher language than C# or Ja...

Today I had two different conversations with folks interested in doing startups. Both were in that pre-business plan phrase. A business plan is not just something that you write for Angel Funding, it is something to precipitate vague ideas into something concrete.   Often in the early days, people think in stream-of-consciousness.  The logic and thinking is fuzzy. The purpose of a napkin business plan is to get a framework, a skeleton to add muscle, flesh, circulation system and fat too. Without a framework, you cannot walk,  you can only slither. Changing the stream into snow (but not ice – you want to keep it pliable ).   To me, the first question is simple – what class of business are you thinking of?   Businesses can be divided to the following general classes: Producer : You build or create a sellable commodity. Your are the factory, examples: Selling Word Templates Selling Control Libraries Selling Accounting Systems ...

There are three main models for startup as the title suggests. In the old days before Open-Source, there was Share-Ware. Often Share-ware allowed a single person to produce a viable startup with no external funding etc.  Support was via email, there was no need for a website, and social media did not exist.   Today, a solo startup could technically make it – but it has the following risks: You get swamped trying to do everything – in fact, you may suffer burn out. If anyone sets their business crosshairs on your business, they can jump ahead of you because they have more resources Moving from solo to team runs a very high risk. There is learning curve to working as a team. If you are running solo, you will likely defer this change until it is forced upon you… Odds are that this will be in the middle of taking off… and the extra load on the single engine will cause the engine to sputter and your firm may crash instead of cash. If you do not have...

A is for “Academics”.  If you are a boot-strapped developer that learnt coding on the job, this is very likely not for you.   Academic literature is full of research that can be rolled into products or components. If you are a Computer Science Grad (or post grad) then a membership to IEEE and/or ACM is a must – solely to get access to their electronic libraries of journal and conference proceedings.   What you will discover are mountains of research which have not been developed into products or components. For example, one of my current project is to research and derive advance Role Base Access component that supports Policy, Distributed,  Temporal and Special.  I’m in the midst of reviewing the literature (for a bibliography of what I am reading is here ).  This type of system is needed by most large organizations – for example: Hospitals (HIIPA), Banks and other financial organizations, large corporations. If you google, you will find that there ...

“D” is for Developer. This means that the product is for developers! You are a domain expert! Examples of successful firms in this space are Telerik , DevExpress , etc. This is the type of project that you are unlikely to get angel funding for initially but it’s a viable business model with the exit strategy being selling off to one of the above.   The typical development system provides basic Lego blocks only. You provide custom blocks that deal with common specific needs (for example, doors and windows!). Below, I will first talk about Controls, the visual widgets.   Control Projects The key for success is success is a new or highly popular development system. Today, that would boil down to: Android (Java core) Windows Phone 7 (CLR core) You can actually jump start your development by looking for Open Source controls and examples of how to modify existing controls. For example, I found a nice color picker example for the Android. On your first pass, y...

C stands for Co-operative as in the co-operative game theory. Ideally this means striking a partnership with an existing business or software product firm. Your goal is to provide an add-on product offering for their product. The motivations of people are shown below:   You, the startup You have an existing market to target If your offering can be on THEIR site, you will get much higher sales at a lower cost Greatly reduced marketing cost Revenue sharing may be part of the agreement – view it as a “sales representative” commission. If you can get an exclusive agreement for 2+ years on your offering then you have that sweet spot called a protected market! Scope of project is usually reduced (you will be interacting, not building a complete system) Them, the established business Allow richer offerings to customers without cash outlay or risk. Allow your core competency to stay focus (especially is a small development staff) Possibl...

B is for bureaucracy – that hated of all things!  The two biggest producers of bureaucratic requirements are governments and union (as in Union Contracts). On the plus side, it often compels companies to buy software. Healthcare is one of the biggest ones but it require domain expertise often. There are many more, for example staffing levels at nursing home [ paper ]. You look at the requirements and start building a sellable application around that.   The key to this is to be first or early to market with compliance to the regulations. There are two approaches – producing a replacement system for what they are using. Your key selling feature is compliance, but you should be competitive on features (see prior post) produce an add-on. This means researching what people are using and figuring out how to get the data out/in. For example, many businesses use Quick Books. Many firms are customer request driven – they will not look at reporting requirements until the...

The first thing to remember is that there are a lot of people that have invented (and patented) better mouse traps that are flipping burgers at MacDonald… A successful startup need a balance between marketing and development. I have seen startups where sales and marketing generated orders that could not be fulfilled by development because they promised stuff that was not deliverable. I have also seen startups with excellent product that could not get enough sales to maintain the company.   Recently I attended an evening called “ Speed Geek ” – a cross between Speed Dating and Dragons’ Den .  Two of the sets of pitchers were folks that I know from various local groups – I got indirect feedback later that for both sets, I provided the best feedback of anyone taking part.   So, I thought a post describing what I consider to be due diligence before ‘investing time or money’ in a startup.   Best of Breed Analysis: Have you Googled and identify all ex...

In the last 2 years, I have been involved as a consultant with 4 startups – some for direct cash, some for equity. In the DotCom boom days, I interviewed around to literally dozens of startup, declined offers from several of them, and ended working for one Startup doing corporate software which eventually folded 18 months after 9/11 because corporate IT Budgets were still severely constrained. When it folded, I checked back on the status of all of the other start-ups that I interviewed with and all of them had already failed except for one. The reason that I declined offers from other startups were because I evaluated the odds of their success to be very low. The typical issues were: Service Company trying to become a product company : product development mentality and contracting/consulting mentality are opposites. What you seek in employees in one is what you do not want in the other. Yet Another Monkey-See Monkey-Do : The product they were trying to create was imitating oth...